Risk register · entry
Q1 · PredictableMorandi Bridge collapse (Genoa)
The designer warned in 1979 the sea air would rust the cables. Nobody coated them. 43 died.
Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.
Why this room
This sits in q1 because the failure mechanism was named in the open literature by the structure's own designer decades before it occurred: Riccardo Morandi's 1979 IABSE paper on the Polcevera viaduct identified the combination of marine salt air and nearby industrial pollution as an accelerant of corrosion in the prestressed-concrete stays, and prescribed removal of rust and protective treatment. Post-collapse expert examination of the failed south stay at pylon 9 found exactly that mechanism, with the majority of strands showing 50-100% cross-section loss from corrosion that began early in the bridge's life. Prosecutors allege the concession operator and its maintenance company knew the stays were in critical condition and deferred the retrofit, which locates the failure in attention and action rather than in information.
The record
- A 210-metre section of the Ponte Morandi collapsed at 11:36 on 14 August 2018, killing 43 people; the bridge had opened on 4 September 1967.certain
- Twelve years after the viaduct opened, Morandi published a 1979 paper, 'The long term behaviour of viaducts subjected to heavy traffic and situated in an aggressive environment: the viaduct on the Polcevera in Genoa', warning that the structure stood in a highly saline atmosphere with harmful vapours from nearby steelworks and prescribing rust removal and epoxy/elastomeric protective treatment.high
- Court-appointed experts found that 68% of the strands in the primary group of the failed stay, and 85% of those further out, showed a cross-section reduction of between 50% and 100%.high
- Fifty-nine defendants went on trial in Genoa from July 2022, mostly Autostrade per l'Italia and Spea executives and engineers plus ministry officials; Autostrade and Spea themselves avoided the criminal trial through an out-of-court settlement with prosecutors that required a 30 million euro payment to the state.certain
- Prosecutors sought nearly 400 years of prison time across 56 of the 57 remaining defendants, including 18 years and 6 months for former Autostrade CEO Giovanni Castellucci; the first-instance verdict is scheduled for 16 July 2026.certain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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